Seed & Grain Cleaning Equipment Manufacturer
A small-shop manufacturer of seed and grain cleaning equipment I've worked with for several years. Across search, brand, remarketing, and YouTube, the account has generated $180K-plus in tracked conversion value on $58K in lifetime spend — and a recent Red Line Review caught $3,000 in wasted spend before it happened.
A small shop, a steady account
Bonnie has manufactured seed and grain cleaning equipment for twenty years, selling to small and medium-sized farmers across the country. It's a small shop with a modest budget — and real room to grow if they can handle more order capacity down the line. I've worked with her over several years, building the account out one channel at a time rather than all at once.
That pace matters. A small manufacturer doesn't need — or want — a sprawling account with budget spread thin across a dozen campaigns. What it needs is each dollar accounted for.
$180K+ in tracked value on $58K spent
Across the lifetime of the account, the core search campaign alone has driven 449 conversions and roughly $97K in tracked conversion value on $36K in spend — calls, buyer's guide downloads, shipping requests, and online orders all rolled into that number.
The brand campaign is the standout: 185 conversions, $64K in tracked value, on just $3.5K spent. That's an 18x return — branded search is usually the most efficient channel in any account, and this is what that looks like when it's actually protected instead of left to run on autopilot.
YouTube spend has been smaller and isn't expected to drive direct conversions the way search does — its job is staying in front of buyers earlier in the research process, the same content-first logic behind the buyer's guide below.
The Trojan Horse Buyer's Guide
A meaningful share of the account's conversions come from a downloadable buyer's guide added to the website early in our relationship — not a sale, but a research-stage asset for buyers who aren't ready to call a sales rep yet.
Most equipment buyers researching seed and grain cleaning solutions are comparing options and checking specs before they're ready to talk to anyone. A buyer's guide gives them something genuinely useful in that moment, instead of asking them to convert before they're ready. I call this a Trojan Horse asset: it gets in the door by being helpful first, then keeps the relationship alive until the buyer is ready to act.
It's a small-budget version of the same principle behind the email list another manufacturer in this series built through their Hoist Buyer's Guide — content that earns its way into the funnel rather than interrupting it.
When the AI-generated plan said "gold mine"
Earlier this year, Bonnie asked AI to build her 2026 marketing plan before our regular check-in. It came back fast and confident — one section called a keyword opportunity a "gold mine." I opened Google's Keyword Planner to check. Those keywords had zero monthly searches. Not low. Zero.
The plan also called for splitting her already-tight budget across new campaigns, when the account's own data showed her existing search campaign was losing more than 23% of available impression share to budget constraints — the working campaign needed more money, not more competition for the same dollars. A 90-minute Red Line Review caught both issues, plus a manual email process that risked violating Gmail's terms of service, before she spent a dollar on any of it.
A small account, run like every dollar counts
Nothing about this account is flashy. It's a small shop, a modest budget, and years of incremental work — protecting brand terms, building a research-stage asset that keeps earning leads years after launch, and catching mistakes before they get expensive. That's what a well-run small account looks like: not a single dramatic win, but a string of decisions that compound.
"Ultimately, AI is great to generate ideas and get you going down a path, however, human review and applying logic and reasoning will always be needed. We cannot blindly follow AI suggestions and recommendations." — Bonnie, seed & grain cleaning equipment manufacturer
Running a small budget and want every dollar accounted for?
Whether it's an account audit, a second opinion on an AI-generated plan, or ongoing management — let's look at what your account's own data actually says.
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